Monthly Archives: May 2009

I’m always amazed by how much things can change in writing.

My Celebration Poem

For Mother’s Day, I decided to write a poem for my mom. Getting a jump on things, I started writing the night before. But, I thought about it for longer than that. Anyway, I had this bumpy, lumpy and awkward thing that halfway through, started to resemble what I wanted to say.

After a while, I put it to bed. The project was leading me to that area of my brain I didn’t want to go. The signpost reads:

r u kidding me? you say you write poetry? hahahahaha, tell me a nudda one

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People ask me about Twitter because I’m doing it. I would love to tell them something insightful, wise and born of my months of tweeting. But really it’s something that you have to do to learn how to do it. And relax on demanding that you understand it.
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It happens sometimes that we get caught up in doing, in acting on plans that we’ve made. I know it happens to me. And it’s great when your job can transport you out of time and place for a while. A lot of times though, we go through life, living whole chunks in passing without focusing on anything.

From time to time though you have to assess where you are. You need to look up from your grindstone to make sure the pieces your milling will still fit into your bigger picture.

The way to gain perspective is to ask yourself questions. Start with three. If your first 3 questions don’t get you where you need to be, then switch out the questions.

I’ll usually keep separate the ones I swapped out, to use later. When I did this exercise using the questions below, I had three alternate queries that got swapped out because they were too far removed from what I was looking for, in the first round.
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You ever notice how people and events, seem to have commonalities in their success stories? Certain characteristic traits are present in success stories I read and hear about, and they tend to jump out at me sometimes. This year, I went home to New Orleans, Louisiana over the Mardi Gras celebration. I witnessed these four common threads of successful behavior in action.

4 Traits of Success

1. Do what you do to the best of your ability
2. In order to satisfy your audience, review feedback
3. Take from feedback only what is useful
4. True success lies in being true to yourself

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Freelance is the life! I work when I want, doing the jobs I want to do. I’m going to be so successful! Isn’t it grand! Well, yes and no.

Like most things in life, freelance is what you bring to it. To get the best results, you should be bringing your A game to whatever work you do. That means doing the administrative stuff behind the glamor of say freelance writing. Yes, I’m smiling.

One of the things I really like about freelancing is that it challenges me to be creative about how I get the attention of folks who may be in need of my services. Consider the following.

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Why Social Media?

Social media is the environment in which communities can blossom. This is far different from websites which are largely one-sided.

Websites are great. It takes a lot of work to pull together the wealth of information to sustain an informative and current website. When done well, they can be great repositories to which readers will return, and refer others. And generally websites list ways that you can contact them, although some make it really hard to find.

What difference does social media offer? The major important difference I see is that social media provides the opportunity to connect with the authors quickly and have a dialogue right on the site. And social media is by definition informal–you know the social aspect. Social media presents fresh usually stamping the posting date.
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